Love is the bread of man.
Until we can love what is ordinary and accept being loved because we are ordinary we can not find security in love.
Love is always in the present tense.
Love begins our acceptance of the end.
Before hydrogen met oxygen, it had no idea it might find itself flowing in rivers, falling from the sky in drops or in extravagantly crystallized snowflakes, hanging as blue white masses of ice from the rock shoulders of high mountains or floating at dawn as white mists above marshes with flame tipped green reeds. Even so, before we have loved we have no idea what transformations the chemistry of relationship will work on us.
There is closeness of the flesh and then there is the closeness of specific human understanding. The miracle is when the two come together.
As coal to diamond is the love that flees self-knowledge to the love that seeks self-knowledge. The first burns quickly, glows intense red and then dims to crumbling ash. The second endures and finds all the colors of creation in the light that passes through it. The love that is like diamond comes to be only under enormous internal pressure.
Love tames us by driving us wild.
It is in the deepest darkness of the human heart that the spark that kindles the way to love is sequestered.
What is a person? Someone who is visible in the light of love not only to himself or herself but to someone else as he or she actually is, with the attendant difficulties and defects.
Love is not a feeling but a process that includes and transforms feelings.
Our hopes die into love, which alone has the power to console us for the incineration of our vanity.
Love may begin with infatuation and idealization, but, if it is to endure, pity must make an entrance and play a leading part. It is pity, not just for the other but for ourselves, that lets us endure disappointment and decline, that can make us larger and more inclusive as we become smaller.
Love has a satirical instinct, regularly rendering us what we could not have imagined being.
Love not only changes what is inside and what is outside, it alters the relationship between inside and outside. It modifies not just the topography of experience but its topology.
To love anew is to be born again.
Our pasts permeate each new love. This is how each new love comes to permeate our pasts, so that we can no longer imagine ourselves apart from this love.
Immeasurably more in the way of inner security and flexibility is required in order to enjoy being desired than in order to desire.
As every lover knows, to try to give everything is to try to take everything.
One of the reasons love produces such complex plots is that it is a double agent that conspires simultaneously with and against our vanity.
We may choose unfaithful lovers to act out our triumphant rejection of ourselves as imperfect. Genuine love is intimacy with the imperfect, not just in ourselves but in others.
We can wish those we profess to love dead out of a desire to preserve them in our imaginations exactly as we would have liked them to be. Such impulses are moments of dread in real love, for they bring us up against the danger of our own desiring.
Love involves a mysterious grade in our acceptance of ourselves brought on by the peril and pleasure of knowing ourselves as an other for another.
We maintain a variety of separate and contradictory estimates and judgments of those we love, employing different ones for different purposes. It is dangerous when one of these estimates or judgments seeks to establish hegemony over the others.
When we love someone, we ask that our lover house all of our previous loves and disappointments, including much of the sorry history of our own love for and disappointment in ourselves. We ask our lover to take in a horde of boarders,, some appealing, others not so. This is a great deal to ask of someone else and explains why, as we move in, the other so often feels crowded out.
We search our lovers for traces of that bodily intimacy we had at the origin of ourselves with our mothers, as if those traces could serve as the keys to a forbidden realm of lost orders of pleasure and exaltation. Yet, even as we search desperately for this bodily intimacy, we fear finding it out of terror that, should we be able again to enter the lost forbidden realm, we would have to leave ourselves at its gates. We long for a solution that we fear as our dissolution.
Love, whose genius it is first to occlude its own limitations, comes only if it endures to the much more difficult and telling task of including them.
To love is to cast our little in with the other’s lot as well as the other’s little in with our lot.
To love is to change.
When we love, we are permeated by the other, so we no longer see only with our own eyes, hear only with our own ears, feel only with our own hearts.
Blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood.
If a couple’s love is to endure, it must accommodate each one’s individual unhappiness.
Everyone we love is a way.